MartinL wrote:This is a bit off topic, but interesting history nevertheless.

To finance Lenin, Stalin’s gangster outfit of hitmen and bank robbers used protection rackets, piracy, blackmail and kidnapping. The Rothschilds were hugely powerful in Baku, yet the Tsar’s secret police and Bolshevik memoirists recorded how the Rothschilds contributed to Stalin’s funds, even paying him off to stop a strike. The Rothschilds never knew that they had employed the future supreme pontiff of Marxism-Leninism -- nor that he burnt down their refinery. The family shrewdly sold their Russian interests in 1912. Only now have they returned to Russia. I recently recounted this to Jacob Rothschild, sending him a postcard of young Stalin on which I wrote, ‘Your Employee of the Month 1902!’

- Simon Jonathan Sebag-Montefiore (born 27 June 1965, London) is a British historian and writer.